Sie hatte offenbar damals beschlossen, Analytikerin zu werden, vielleicht auch um sich in ihrer Situation als Emigrantin Hilfe zu holen. Es war damals sehr schwer Patienten zu finden, die Honorare waren gering. Sie erlebte, wie die Kinder den ganzen Tag am Stuhl festgebunden waren und sich gegenseitig die Haare ausrissen.
Schockiert durch diese Erfahrungen begann sie nach und nach mit Kinderbehandlungen. Innerhalb ihrer Ausbildungsgruppe in Manchester waren die Beziehungen sehr eng und verwickelt. Balints Frau war gestorben und heiratete er eine Ausbildungskandidatin. Aber vielleicht war ja gerade diese Arbeit die Rettung aus Angst und Verzweiflung. Balint als ihr Analytiker durfte jetzt nicht mehr gleichzeitig ihr Supervisor sein. Sie ging zu Strachey und mit ihrem zweiten Fall zu Melanie Klein.
Auch in London arbeitete Esther Bick wieder an einer Kinderklinik, was sie sehr liebte. Gleichzeitig begann sie mit der Kindertherapieausbildung. Kurz davor hatte sie ihre analytische Ausbildung am British Institute abgeschlossen und ihre erste Arbeit auf dem Gebiet der Psychoanalyse vorgelegt. Ihr erster Kinderfall wurde von Klein supervidiert, der zweite von Paula Heimann und hatte Esther Bick ihre Ausbildung abgeschlossen. Jetzt wollte sie ihre Analyse bei Melanie Klein fortsetzen. Balint schien dem keinen Widerstand entgegengesetzt zu haben.
Dieses eigene Denken zeigte sich erstmalig bei ihrem Vortrag im Juni , mit dem sie die Mitgliedschaft in der Britischen Psychoanalytischen Gesellschaft erwarb. Da sie weder weiter an ihm kleben noch ihn hinunterschlucken konnte geriet sie in eine Art Totenstarre agony. Ihre Assoziationen zu diesem Kleben waren: Sie beschreiben etwas Neues, einen Zustand, der sich vor dem befindet, den Melanie Klein mit ihren Begriffen von Projektion und Introjektion vor Augen hat.. Zuerst versuchte ich, das Problem zu mildern, indem ich die Seminarteilnehmer dazu ermunterte, dem Baby mehr Aufmerksamkeit zu widmen und weniger der Mutter..
Dies half jedoch nicht. Dies ist nur eine kleine Kostprobe, die Ihnen Lust machen soll, selbst weiter zu lesen. Das hing wohl mit ihrem Wesen und ihrer starken kleinianischen Ausrichtung zusammen. Martha Harris, ihre Nachfolgerin, schreibt in ihrem Nachruf , aus dem ich schon zitiert habe: Die Psychoanalyse und Israel. Ihre Schriften zur Kinderanalyse und zur Infant Observation waren sehr fruchtbar und sind es bis heute geblieben.
Aber es ist eher ihre Art zu Lehren als zu schreiben, die bei allen, die mit ihr gearbeitet haben, in Erinnerung bleiben werden. Dear colleagues, dear guests, Our institute has now been in existence for 10 years. It came into being as a result of the dedicated efforts of the colleagues from the former GDR, who after German reunification began training in line with the London Tavistock model — a unique development in Germany.
In the years that followed, they worked intensively and with great enthusiasm with former students from the Tavistock, especially with Suzanne Maiello from Rome and Ross Lazar from Munich who we would like to thank warmly at this point. The Tavistock model was introduced in under the directorship of John Bowlby. It's purpose was to train colleagues from different disciplines in child and youth psychotherapy. The Infant observation established by Ester Bick became one of the mainstays of the training.
Alongside its emphasis on high quality psychoanalysis, social aspects were also an important consideration of this training model. On the basis that children ought to be treated irrespective of their social background, a link was forged, in those early days, to the NHS. Perhaps this aspect was also one of the contributing factors for the colleagues choosing this particular training — after all, with German reunification, they themselves had been thrown into immense social upheaval. And thus the Haus der Demokratie, the House of Democracy, is not a coincidental, but rather a very apt location for our celebration.
This is where those critical of the GDR regime assembled together before the wall came down. In naming our institute after Esther Bick, the pioneering founder of infant observation, we wish to honour a woman who, as a Polish Jew, suffered the fate of emigration and the loss of her family who were murdered in the Holocaust. Her name is inseparable with this very particular kind of infant observation while her person it sometime seems has disappeared behind this.
Their perspective is thus no cold research instrument. Esther Blick was gifted with a great intuition for very early emotional states. We have the fortune and the honour to welcome here a former pupil of Esther Bick. Judith Elkan can speak to us about Esther Bick from her own experience and we are very thankful that she has taken on the stress of the journey in order to speak to us here today.
In the 50s Judith left Israel for London to train at the Tavistock clinic. The ingenious thing about infant observation is the simple and clear setting combining mother and father containing elements: Thus little by little the essence of a completely individual relationship between this baby and this mother can be experienced. When we consider that Esther Bick established this setting in London in , thus directly after the end of the war, we can only marvel. Only ten years earlier she herself had fled from Vienna and the Nazis, and she still did not know for certain what fate her relatives had met under German occupation.
Esther Bick was not a woman who spoke publicly or even wrote about her private life. She had been married for a short time in Vienna and seems to have separated from her husband sometime along the escape route to London via Switzerland — no details are known. She had a few good friends with whom she maintained contact until her death. She lived and worked in a house in Hampstead directly under the roof.
Ross Lazar remembered how everyone who climbed the many stairs to visit her had to bring apple strudel with them — probably in memory of her Vienna days. She must have had an impressive ability to empathise with the inner world of babies and children. At the same time she was strict and demanding with herself and others.
She is said to have often been very dissatisfied with the words which she tried to use to describe what she perceived and felt. She must have truly suffered under the inadequacy of these words, and that is probably one of the main reasons why she published so little. A lot of people thought this very regretful and tried to encourage her. Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris, especially, supported her publishing efforts, and sometimes they searched together for appropriate formulations.
He complained that she could not conceptualize. Sometimes when speaking, she completely despaired over this difficulty. The loss of her Polish native tongue and the frequent change in languages probably did not help here. In Vienna she spoke German and later only English. Her English is said to have been excellent, but I imagine that particularly in describing early emotions, it would have been much easier for her to have used her mother tongue, Polish.
Former pupils recount having been afraid to present their material to her. For her there were good candidates and bad candidates, and if one belonged to the bad lot, one did not have it easy. She is said to have often left little room for differing opinions and interpretations. At the same time Meltzer describes her as an inspiring teacher and her thought as intuitive and poetical.
She seems to have struggled to unite these contradictions within herself: In this, her love of psychoanalysis, thus also of thinking, would certainly have helped her to combine creativity with defense. After her death she inherited her analyst couch. Bion borrowed the concept from the English poet John Keats.
This capacity is of great significance in infant observation, in the analytical attitude, and in what Bion named the motherly reverie. It imposes on the child analyst a greater dependence on his unconscious to provide him with clues to the meaning of the child's play and non-verbal communications. With the infant observation Esther Bick — also at this time — created a space in which it could be thought about in a perceiving and feeling mode. Thus both in their own way continued the work of Melanie Klein. She was born on 4 July in the town of Przemysl in Polish Galicia as the first child of Jewish parents and she died on 20 July , at just over 81 years, in London.
Three publications on Esther Bick were especially helpful for this talk: For the information on her early years in Poland I owe thanks to the work of the Krakauer colleague Andrzej Gardziel from Ross Lazar works closely with this group and I am grateful to him for a copy of this dissertation, which I have brought you to look at. You will find this and all other sources for my talk along with a list of the few publications by Esther Bick in the literature list.
Gardziel describes the town of Przemysls in Galicia, which lay close to the Russian border and belonged to Austria-Hungary from until Poland regained its independence after the First World War. For hundreds of years people of different religions and cultures lived there together. The region prospered and the population grew. Due to its closeness to the Russian border, during the First World War Przemysl was of strategic importance, and in and it was transitionally occupied by the Russians.
Later, on 15 September it was occupied by the Germans, but by then Esther Bick was already in London. She is believed to have left Poland in , having passed her Abitur A levels. Original text She is reported to have told Joan Symington that already during her school days she had had to leave home for a long period, apparently going to Prague to help out an aunt with her baby over a space of three years. It must have been a difficult childhood. Her very young parents had financial problems.
Her father who worked in a bank lost his job; the family lived in tenement housing for financially needy Jews. Esther Bick as the oldest daughter presumably had a lot of duties, especially in the upbringing of the younger siblings. Her own development and desires would certainly have often taken a back seat. This repeated itself later as she financed her training by looking after children.
Instead of being allowed to be a child herself, she took care of other children — and this she evidently did well and with great enjoyment. A further irruption in her life was the early death of her father from tuberculosis. At the time Esther Bick was only 22 years old. Esther Bick had already learned Hebrew and wanted so much to go to Palestine, but she had to give this plan up. Instead she did a short apprenticeship as a Kindergarten teacher. Then At 24 years of age she passed her Abitur exams and decided to go to Vienna, because it was not possible for her as a Jew to study in Poland.
Her desire to go to study with Piaget in Switzerland also remained unfulfilled, as Switzerland at the time did not take foreign students. She complained that stop watches were used and the social responses of the children to one another were counted, whereas she wanted to observe something that could not be quantified. A short quotation should show how we can already recognize the ideas which were later to permeate her own method of infant observation.
The child has become an understanding observer. Thus being forced to leave Vienna with the occupation of Austria by the Nazis in must have been all the more traumatic. Newly married she fled via Switzerland to England. She had apparently by then decided to become an analyst, perhaps also to get help for herself in her emigrant situation. In London her attempt to find a place in analysis failed and so in December she came to the training group in Manchester which Balin was in the process of setting up. It was very difficult at the time to find patients. The wages were low.
The first training group began in March and was understood as a subgroup of the London institute; the candidates had to go to London for the interviews and a lot of supervisions also took place there. Esther Bick began her training analysis in with Balint for a fee of a few shillings, supporting herself by working as a nanny.
The situation in the northern English nurseries appalled Esther Bick. Shocked by these experiences, she gradually began to work treating children. Seeking help with this difficult task, she discovered the writings of Melanie Klein, which tallied with her own convictions and deeply impressed her. It seems that she had finally found something which she had always sought — for the children she wished to treat, but also for the child within herself. It must have been a very special, exciting time — in the middle of the war and in the midst of the high phase of the so-called Controversial Discussions.
Introduced by Balint, in March and April she took part in two of these meetings. Susan Isaacs paper on the unconscious phantasy was discussed. It all left a deep impression on Esther Bick and she was shocked at the tone of the meeting and the way they interacted with one another. Within her own training group in Manchester the relationships were very close and involved.
Balint was simultaneously training analyst, supervisor and tutor for the candidates, which did not seem to have disturbed him, since it was similar to the Hungarian Society model. The seminars took place in turns in the living quarters of the tutors and candidates. The treatments too were carried out in the living quarters. We do not know how this event affected Bick; it could be that it contributed to her subsequent critical judgment of Balint.
The situation of the emigrants was further aggravated by the uncertainty of the fate of their relatives. The news of their deaths was slow in reaching England — death by suicide or murdered in the concentration camps. Bick only learned in that apart from her niece who had emigrated to Israel, her whole family, including her parents and siblings, had died in the concentration camps.
It must have been a horrific time for the analysts and their candidates and patients. There was so much uncertainty and so many losses that today we can hardly imagine how in this atmosphere it was possible to do analysis. But perhaps this very work provided a sanctuary from fear and despair. In July Esther Bick continued her training in London.
The Manchester group was disbanded. She went to Stachey and with her second case to Melanie Klein. In London Esther Bick also began working again at a child guidance clinic, which she really loved. Later she recalled a boy who came with his grandmother, which reminded her of her own loving grandmother. When Bowlby initially tried to recruit her for the Tavistock clinic in , she was not at all enthusiastic. At the same time she began training in child therapy. In this she was totally in line with the Zeitgeist of the post-war Labour Party, who were planning the establishment of the National Health Service.
Finally in she took on a senior position in the newly established child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock. Shorty before this, she had completed her analytic training at the British Institute and delivered her first psychoanalytic paper. She became a passionate follower of her work. Her first child case was supervised by Klein, the second by Paula Heimann, and in Esther Bick completed her training. Now she wanted to continue her analysis with Melanie Klein. Balint seems not to have put up any opposition. Grosskurth in her biography about Melanie Klein says the following: Original English version supplied by the analyst.
She never spoke about it, on the other hand she looked back on her nine year analysis with Balint very critically. There is an anecdote which she recounted to Hanna Segal. She told her that on occasion she could not offer free associations, reflecting perhaps inner conflicts which she could not express. Perhaps she adopted something of his independent thinking and his flexibility without idealizing him. And this allowed her, despite her great loyalty to Melanie Klein, to develop her own very individual concepts. This independent thinking is first apparent in the lecture in June with which she obtained membership of the British Psychoanalytic Society.
In it she describes the analysis of a 30 year old married woman with suicidal impulses and severe phobic states, including claustrophobia and vaginism. This woman vacillated between a desperate clinging to her objects for her own survival and a great anxiety over the well-being of these objects given her own need for omnipotent control. During the Christmas break of there was an emergency session due to severe panic attacks.
all-female strings ensemble - weibliches Streicherensemble
Esther Bick wrote on this: It was so frightening because she was sure she was not dreaming. She saw herself very small, clinging to her husband with her mouth and body. She felt she must get down or she would damage him irreparably, but knew that if she got down she would go mad and die. She could neither go on clinging nor get down and felt paralysed in agony.
I interpreted that through making her aware in the analysis that the leash with which she clung to me and her husband was her vampire mouth, she felt that I had made her more ill than before she came to me. She describes something new, a state which is prior to that which Melanie Klein has in mind with her concepts of projection and introjection. In order to project and introject there must be a rudimentary idea of an inner and outer space which can be filled or emptied and of a border between the two.
An interesting discovery I made during my work on this lecture was that far from exclusively devoting herself to the inner condition of the baby, Esther Bick was also — originally almost unintentionally — concerned with the condition of the mother. She describes this in her work on infant observation: While we have known for some time that these trends are almost universal, I was not prepared for the intensity with which they impinged on the observer.
Their attitude was highly critical and emotional. At first I tried to mitigate the problem by encouraging them to give more attention to the baby and less to the mother. This did not help. I realized it was necessary to give more consideration to this factor — the depression in the mother and its impact on the observer as well as on the baby and other members of the family. The mother can be clearly seen to be experiencing emotional detachment from the baby, helplessness in understanding and meeting its needs, relying on the baby to make use of her breasts, hands, voice, as part objects.
Here we can imagine an abundance of clinical phenomena — ranging from ADS syndrome to the obsessive-compulsive disorders. Surviving space would then come to mean surviving the experience of being hurtled through space —with the help of a new survival space, which consists in the physical and mental presence of the mother. In one of her publications Esther Bick quotes from the protocol of a very sensitive observer: Mother then laid him in her lap again so that his feet were pointing at her stomach.
When put down his hands and legs flew out, almost like an astronaut in a gravityless zone. She responded by talking gently to him again and bringing both his hands down to his stomach with her hands. She then laid him on the changing pad saying that he did not usually like to be changed.
It also contains all of her publications apart from the first paper on the young woman who I described earlier. You will also find reports by her students on the training years with her and on the various fields of application of her ideas, amongst others in the pedagogic field and in the understanding of groups. It will be evident how closely her theoretical thought is linked with what she experienced during the infant observations and how she attempted to find concepts which could link the physical and the emotional. This of course Freud had already done. As a neurologist he was convinced of the entrenchment of the psyche in the body and also that this connection would be revealed as research progressed.
This simultaneously nurturing and sealing relation can then be introjected and builds the body-mind core of all relation phantasies. To conclude I would like once more to return to her life journey. There, in a change took place, when Bowlby decided not to renew her position as director of child therapy training. This was probably connected with her personality and her strong Kleinian orientation. Martha Harris, her successor, wrote in her obituary in , from which I have already quoted: Nusia Bick [as she was called by her friends] was never at any period of her life a compromiser and the course came under fire for its narrow Kleinian orientation.
When in she was told by Dr Bowlby that he would no longer be asking her to undertake responsibility for another intake of students, she decided to leave the clinic and to concentrate upon her analytic work and on her teaching at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Nevertheless she continued to give extra-mural and private seminars to child psychotherapists for the next twenty years. During that time she also did a great deal of teaching abroad in Spain, in Italy, also in South America, Israel and Switzerland. Analysts and candidates came to her for supervision from these countries and also from France, the Commonwealth and the United States.
She had high hopes of both, and to both she applied equally high standards which were impossible to realize, and so inevitably she was disappointed by the imperfections in them. Those exacting standards she applied also to herself and her writing, which was seldom allowed to reach the printed page. Her papers on child analysis and on infant observation were seminal and remain so. But it is as a teacher rather than as a writer that she will be remembered by many of us who worked with her. Her appreciation of material presented to her, her capacity to seize upon salient points and use then to bring alive the personality of the child or person described, had a poetic quality displayed only by those who love life intensely.
She had a vision of how lives might be improved by psychoanalysis, a burning desire to communicate this in her teaching, and little tolerance of attitudes which stood in the way of this. Her uncompromising and sometimes narrow vision gained her enemies and critics, but its integrity and illuminating force won from many others, especially from young people who were eager to learn, a devotion and admiration which few people are able to inspire. Lest this brief note about her life and complicated personality make her sound too austere, it should be said that she had a great sense of fun and gaiety, and a store of Jewish jokes.
Nach Amerika! Ein Volksbuch. Erster Band by Friedrich Gerstäcker
Gordon hat kein tertium comparationis. Darin besteht sein Dilemma. Angeblich gab es im Deutschland der er und er Jahre keine andere Alternative zu Heideggers Philosophie als eben diesen idealistischen Typus Cassirer. Aber dies ist weder historisch-faktisch noch philosophisch-systematisch gesehen wahr.
Es geht mir um dritte philosophische Positionen, die in der Disputation zwischen Cassirer und Heidegger selbst im Zentrum standen. Darin besteht das Interessante an dieser Disputation: Beide, sowohl Cassirer als auch Heidegger, wollen nicht als Philosophische Anthropologen gelten. Sie verschweigen beide ihre impliziten Anthropologien in Davos, das Dasein der Endlichkeit und die Unendlichkeit der symbolischen Formen, indem sie sie als Philosophien ausgeben.
Es ging um seine Nachfolge und sein Erbe. Alle beeilten sich, sie anzutreten. Heidegger widmete Scheler sein Kant-Buch Cassirers Stichworte gaben Schelers Thema richtig wieder: Wie kommt es zur Vergeistigung des Lebens und zur Verlebendigung des Geistes? Darin bestand nicht nur die zentrale Frage der Philosophischen Anthropologie, sondern auch der Lebensphilosophie Diltheys, deren Systematisierer Georg Misch war. Band der symbolischen Formen, finden sich die Spuren der Auseinandersetzung mit Plessner.
Zu den historischen Fakten: Auflage als Monographie erschien. Hatte es beiden die Sprache verschlagen? Heidegger beginnt im Dasein, dem es in seinem Sein um das Sein selbst gehen soll, und Cassirer beginnt in den symbolischen Formen, die das menschliche Selbstbewusstsein historisch und systematisch als Kulturformen spezifizieren sollen. Ich konnte sehen, wie frustriert und voller Zorn er war - er konnte gar nicht anders handeln. Aber ich habe die ganze Idee von Meditation und den sogenannten seligen, friedlichen Zustand in Frage gestellt, in den sie einen angeblich versetzen soll.
Es war diese Vorstellung, die in mir das Gegenteil schuf, und das war das 'Ich'. Johannes Tag , ego sum qui sum," steht auf einer E-mail an U. Das ist erst der Anfang" sagt U. Der Tag ist strahlend, klar und warm. Deshalb hat sein Werk diesen ganz eigenen 'Touch'. Thun ist eine attraktive Stadt. Das Restaurant sieht verlassen aus. Gottfried, Paul und ich bedienen uns von der Salatbar, und U. Sein Blick richtet sich auf die Papierunterlage, die die Kellnerin vor ihm ausgebreitet hat.
Jetzt sehen Sie hier, wie diese Burschen Sex dazu verwenden, Wasser zu vermarkten. Jeder verdient mit Sex Geld, verurteilt ihn aber gleichzeitig. Als wir unser Essen beenden, macht er diese bizarre Bemerkung: Also frage ich ihn: Wenn dieser Mechanismus verschwindet, der in Ihnen die Vorstellungen erweckt, dann verschwinden auch Sie.
Sie werden an dieser Stelle, in diesem Augenblick physisch tot umfallen. Heute ist mein achtzehnter Morgen in Gstaad. Besonders dann, wenn man nach dem Klang der Stille lauscht. Ich fange an, die Wahrheit dieser Aussage zu sehen. Selbst Sehen ist Reden. Was er sagt, verwirrt mich. Und der wurde von der Kultur dort eingerichtet Sie schaffen Hierarchien und zwingen sie anderen armen hilflosen Leuten auf.
Sie treffen einen armen Jungen, der um Geld bettelt. Krishnaji umarmt ihn, anstatt ihm Geld zu geben. Heute lasse ich mein Ticket via London umbuchen. Ich habe meinen Plan fallengelassen, nach Athen zu fliegen, um dort nach einem Drehort zu suchen. Auf meinem Heimweg finde ich U. Seshagiri Rao, erhalten hat. Bob, Paul und ich entwischen U. Zur Essenszeit bittet U. Und lassen Sie nicht all das Zeug hier liegen. Ich werfe Leute weg.
Ich habe meine Frau, meine Kinder und alle anderen verlassen. Glauben Sie, ich sammle diese billigen Sachen, die Sie kaufen? Geld lassen Sie nie herumliegen, nicht wahr? Was das Geld anlangt, verhalten Sie sich wie eine Hure Was macht das denn? Das ist der Anfang vom Ende Sein 'Galgenhumor' funktioniert nicht. Sie ballt sich zusammen und hindert uns daran, den lebendigen Augenblick einzuatmen. Bin ich denn nichts als der tote Abfall der Vergangenheit, ein nichtendender Widerhall der Milliarden von Gestern der menschlichen Rasse? Unser 'Guten Morgen' kommt heute morgen simultan.
Kiran ist der Sohn von Narayana Moorty und Wendy. Der ruhige Morgen wird von der Ankunft Julies zerrissen. Geld werden Sie niemals bringen Es ist nicht, was Sie getan haben, sondern was Sie sind, das ich verabscheue. Mein 'leerer Geist' hallt jetzt von den Nachbeben dieses Ausbruchs wider. Es scheint alles so einfach zu sein. Wir sollten sein wie die Tiere; zehn, zwanzig Lebensjahre, das ist genug. Der Schaden durch die Meditation ist dagegen irreparabel und irreversibel. Ich brauche Julie nicht, sie braucht mich. Alle Beziehungen, die Sie mit mir haben, sind nur einseitig.
Das Beziehungsspiel wird sogar noch gemeiner, wenn es dabei um Sex geht. Der Countdown hat begonnen. Nur noch neun Tage, dann werde ich diesen Ort hoffentlich verlassen haben. Ein neuer Tag hat begonnen. Warum schreiben die Menschen so viel? Tun sie es, weil sie einsam sind und voll des Bedauerns? Das Schreiben ist die Suche des Menschen nach Fortdauer. Alle Sinngebungen sind die eigenen. Bin ich bereit, das, was er sagt, anzunehmen? Vielleicht ist es auch eine kritische und nachdenkliche Pause im mittleren Alter. Da ist ein Buch mit dem Titel: Dieses Buch ist eine philosophische Reise in das Gehirn.
Es wurde von Paul M. Aber, es tut mir leid, das nehme ich ihm nicht ab. Was mich angeht, so ist diese wissenschaftlich untermauerte Theorie dieses Burschen lediglich eine Mode. Was immer man auch lernen, was man auch lehren mag, es ist funktional. Es dient nur dazu, in dieser Welt, die Sie geschaffen haben, zu funktionieren. Was man auch in dieses Feuer, das U. Ich habe nichts dagegen. Ich sage nur, wie es ist. Was ist denn los, Chandrasekhar?
Wo ist denn das Geld abgeblieben? In der Schweiz oder in Indien? Jemand verdient an unserem Geld. Seltsam, wie das Leben so spielt: Wir sind im Begriff, uns am Abend hinzusetzen, um uns 'Forrest Gump' anzusehen. Sie sind genau wie Julie. Haben Sie das verstanden?
Sie wollen unbedingt eine Beziehung zu mir unterhalten, nicht ich zu Ihnen. Eine eigenartige Ruhe senkt sich auf den Raum. Und ich gebe auf. Er braucht dazu nicht die Hilfe Ihres Intellekts. Ihre Freuden und Leiden haben nur in dem, was als 'Erfahrungsstuktur' bezeichnet wird und was Ihr Intellekt ist, ihre permanente Existenz.
Nachdem, was gestern Abend geschehen ist, habe ich Angst davor, mit diesem Mann in Kontakt zu kommen. Unterwegs halten wir, um zu tanken. Als wir aussteigen, um uns die Beine zu vertreten, meint Bob scherzhaft: Sie sind voll und ganz davon in Anspruch genommen, sich ihre Nahrung zu suchen. Sehen Sie den kleinen da unten? Das zu werden, dazu sollten Sie Ihren Kindern verhelfen. Wir gehen getrennten Weges und machen Zeit und Ort aus, an dem wir uns wiedertreffen wollen. Ich gehe in einen Buchladen. Die Worte Natarajs gehen mir durch den Sinn: Wir fahren in die Stadt. Ich gebrauche meinen Kopf nicht, weil ich keinen habe.
Schauen Sie nur, denken Sie nicht," sagt U. Ich rufe in Bombay an. Ich wache mit pochendem Kopf auf. Das ist alles, was es gibt. Eine Form des Lebens lebt von der anderen. Alles, was der Mensch tut, macht er um des Genusses willen. Deshalb strebt man ihn an. Sie selbst sind eine Idee! Ich litt unter Dhalentzug. Das Essen selbst ist eine Sucht. Das eine zentrale Thema, das zur Zeit in seinen Reden immer wieder hervorbricht, ist: Auch ich sage nichts. Es besteht kein Bedarf, das, was sie gesagt haben durch das, was ich gesagt habe, zu ersetzen.
August ist Valentines Geburtstag. Gleichzeitig drucken sie auch ganzseitige farbige Anzeigen mit Zigarettenreklamen. Sehen Sie hinunter auf den Tennisplatz, wie die Menschen singen und tanzen. Wer zum Teufel erinnert sich schon an die Opfer, die man gebracht hat, wenn man einmal tot und vergangen ist? Das ist seine Antwort auf U. Bis zu seiner Pensionierung hatte er Wir haben hier einige sehr gute Filme gesehen. Was Filme anlangt, so hat U.
Ein schlechter Film ist so gut wie ein guter. Mukesh ist wieder betrunken. Sie drohen damit, ihn festzunehmen. Er hat in Vorwegnahme dessen 'Medizin' geschluckt. Ein Teil von mir schreit: Seine Worte gaben mir das Selbstvertrauen, dessen ich so sehr bedurfte.
Warum sollte ein armer Inder einem reichen Inder, wie Sie einer sind, etwas umsonst geben? Ich werfe mich eine Weile in meinem Bett hin und her und warte auf den Schlaf. Habe ich Sie geweckt, Sir? Ich glaube, wir sind aus dem Schlimmsten heraus. Das Leben eines Schriftstellers ist eine Qual. An diesem Morgen wird zwischen mir und U.
Seine Augen sind geschlossen. Er sieht heute wundervoll aus. Da sie mich still dasitzen sehen, lassen sie sich auf mir nieder und haben einen Festtag. Sie lassen mich einfach nicht still sitzen. Da gibt es Deutsche, Italiener, Franzosen und auch Amerikaner. Wissen Sie, warum sie in Ihr Land kommen? Und sie alle tauschen ihr Geld auf dem schwarzen Markt um. Die Regierung verdient gar nichts an solchen Leuten. Sie brauchen dieses Touristengeld nicht. Zum Lunch haben wir einen charmanten Besucher.
Sein Name ist Donald Ingram Smith. Donald trifft sich oft mit U. Er ist, laut U. Ich lade jeden, der kommt, dazu ein, alles mitzunehmen. Ich trage das neue Seidenhemd, das mir U. Wir sind Narren, unseren Glauben und unser Vertrauen in die Wissenschaftler zu setzen. Wir haben heute mehr Worte in unserem Arsenal als es Shakekspeare zu seiner Zeit hatte. Sagen Sie, was Sie wollen, aber was das Leben ist, werden wir niemals wissen.
Da unten in der Stadt Gstaad blasen sie einen riesigen blauen Ballon auf. Wieder einmal machen sich die Feiernden auf, weit weg in den Himmel hinein zu fliegen. I am especially grateful to my course director in ethnomusicology and supervisor, Dr. Colin Quigley, for his guidance and encouragement throughout my research project. My thanks go to Colin and to Dr. Aileen Dillane for their ongoing support of my future endeavours and to Prof.
Mel Mercier for broadening my horizons as a scholar and a practitioner. I would also like to express my gratitude to the other staff members at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, ethnomusicologists, ethnochoreologists, ritual scholars and Irish music and dance specialists, who have equipped me with the necessary methodological and theoretical skill set to venture into the field.
In particular, thanks to Dr. Mats Melin and Prof. At this point, I would like to appreciate the vital contributions of my research consultants to this project.
Moreover, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to thank my family, the Morgensterns, Klaus and Irmlinde Kiupel, Konstanze, Wilfried, and Patric Beiersdorf, for their ongoing support throughout my time at the University of Limerick. I dedicate this work to my parents, Felicitas and Tomas, who have always encouraged me and who helped me make sense of this complex German Other with which they grew up and which is the focus of my research. Weltfestspiele in Andert et al. Interview mit Gert Steinert German Interview with Gert Steinert English Interview mit Wolfgang Leyn German Interview with Wolfgang Leyn English In GDR times, Pfeffi worked as an event organiser for a centralised cultural cabinet.
Through his work, he met members of the then rapidly emerging GDR folk music scene. Immersing myself in existing scholarship in this area, I learned that Leipzig was once a central hub for East German folk musicians. I was, until then, largely unaware of this fact. One could say, that I am anticipating my encounter with a German Other, members of a music scene which thrived in times quite distant to somebody, who was born four years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an event which heralded the demise of the GDR in Talking about my experiences as an uilleann piper and music student in Ireland and prizing open my knowledge of the popularity of Irish music in the GDR appears fruitful in breaking the initial ice.
Thirty-Three Discussions, Bruno Nettl , pp. At the beginning of his chapter with the gently provocative and interrogating title You Call That Fieldwork? As a German-born practitioner of Irish Traditional Music from Berlin, who moved to Ireland in to study Irish music at the University of Limerick, my previous research interests were situated at the juncture of ethnomusicology and Irish music studies. In the context of my senior undergraduate thesis Morgenstern , I conducted research on the ramifications of Irish music making in Germany 1. The intriguing outcomes of this work fuelled my desire to pursue postgraduate studies in ethnomusicology and to expand upon my previous research.
An initial sense of othering that my scholarly inquiry unveils is tied to the spatial distance between my chosen alma mater, a home away from home, and my field site, Germany, which I study from the outside perspective of an ethnographer. At the start of my M. Based on fieldwork among members of the German Irish music community in , I examined the factors that inform the perception and performance of Irish Traditional Music by German-born practitioners. For these individuals, the possibilities of trans-cultural exchange and post-ethnic configurations of musical practice appear to have reshaped historically-rooted notions of ethnic-national identity, expressed through European folk music genres in the late 19 th and early 20th centuries.
Tracing historical trans-cultural musical affinities between Germany and Ireland, as amplified in late 20th century German folk music revival movements, my B. These discursive changes recursively shape the participatory frame of German Irish music sessions, which is governed on the basis of gatekeeping regulations, such as musical prowess, inclusivity, and session etiquette. For further details, see: Surprisingly however, these post-war portrayals merely glossed over the East German situation.
The third facet of an internal German Other that my thesis strives to uncover, is connected to the notion of timely distance. As apparent in the ethnographic excerpt above, the 70s GDR folk music revival context and East German society itself is quite removed from a researcher, who was born in Until commencing my postgraduate studies, my understanding of life in the GDR was informed by often vividly ostalgic 2 and sometimes critically-evaluated stories told by my parents and grandparents, as well as the compulsory historical and political education I received before starting my career as a scholar.
Yet, music was largely absent from these narratives. It was my surging interest in post-war German folk music making, combined with my critical attitude towards the reoccurring binary and often undialectical portrayals of life in socialist East Germany that intrigued me to find out what was at stake in terms of the performative practice of artists, who still live and work in the former epicentres of the revival scene. Although East German products were readily ridiculed in their symbolism for inefficiency by West German citizens after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, they remained loaded with remembered values of East German identity powerful enough to counteract the hegemony of a Western market economy in the present.
Indiana University Press, In terms of addressing an overarching research problem in ethnomusicology, Folk Music in the German Democratic Republic: Exploring Lived Musical Experience and Post-War German Folk Music Discourses places my ethnographic encounters with figures of the GDR folk music scene, this German Other, at the heart of its narrative, giving credit to their lived musical experiences and the ways in which they shaped a trans-German post-war folk music revival movement in terms of its topicality in the public consciousness at that time. Outlining these areas of inquiry allows me to now formulate the central research questions underpinning my thesis: How are these views related to established scholarly discourses on folk music making in the GDR and how do they manifest in concrete musical form?
Having provided an overview of the thematic concerns of this paper, I now proceed to outline the ramifications of my ethnographic research, before drawing upon my methodological approaches and critically assessing existing literature in my field of inquiry. This should provide the reader with the necessary background knowledge to follow my line of argumentation in the following chapters.
Prior to my arrival in the field, I decided to conduct ethnographic interviews with four individuals, who engaged with the folk music scene either as practitioners or as employees of the East German cultural administration and thus provided varying insights, emerging from outside of and from within the state apparatus. Initial contact was established by email correspondence and with the help of Dr.
Before introducing my fieldwork consultants, I clarify, how I prepared and conducted my ethnographic interviews. This subsequently leads me to point out the centrality of lived musical experience in my methodological concerns. In terms of interview question design, I incorporated references to specific musical examples and key events of the GDR folk music revival movement in order to direct the flow of the conversation with my informants.
Writing on interview techniques, Jackson , p. Particularly in terms of the latter, allowing the interviewee to direct the flow of the conversation and only gently redirecting them to expand on certain utterances led to the uninitiated surfacing of emic nuances in musical experience. Rice urges ethnographers to move towards atomized studies of individual practitioners and their encounters with the increasingly fragmented and de-territorialised world of mobile identities we live in.
However, as the authors posit, by idealising societies as homogeneous and bounded, scholars have frequently overlooked frictions between individuals and their cultural values and failed to address their active agency in the transformation of music cultures. In his seminal work on the encounters of two folk musicians with societal, cultural and political shifts during the communist period in Bulgaria, Rice , p. In the field, I was confronted with the very tensions between different strata of lived musical experience that Rice describes.
This is especially pertinent in relation to ethnographic responses commenting on the stylistic, textual and musical choices made by East German artists and their often ambiguous relationship with state authorities. This example, upon which I expand in chapter three, shows that a nuancing of established binary discourses on the basis of ethnographic research appears most fruitful, if the contrasting views of individual interviewees are brought into dialogue with each other.
According to Rice and Ruskin , pp. Heidegger posits that, by experiencing and making sense of symbolic webs, such as language, music and social behaviour, the individual is equipped to finally arrive at a new understanding of the world. As the authors would have it, I have further considered the role of non- musicians, who were equally important, as they facilitated performance opportunities for members of the East German folk music scene. The following brief introduction should give the reader a sense of my interviewees, their personalities, and the complimenting perspectives they contribute to my research.
In GDR times, Pfeffi was an important link between folk musicians and the state apparatus, since he was responsible for facilitating performance opportunities at a local youth club. His perspective is differentiated and combines intensely personal musical experience with scholarly inquiry and reflection. Having introduced my research consultants, I now turn to outlining my strategies for representing fieldwork outcomes in the thesis text, focusing on the techniques of dialogue, translation and musical transcription. Throughout my work, I thus place direct or paraphrased interview quotations in dialogue with each other and add my own interpretative voice, to provide an active arena for the exchange of multiple layers of lived musical experience.
Furthermore, this allows the reader to trace, how my examination and nuancing of discursive mechanisms in the thesis text emerges out of my original ethnographic correspondences. To protect the rights of my research informants, I conducted ethnographic interviews through the medium of German, before translating the outcomes into English. This enabled me to freely converse with consultants in our shared mother tongue, enriched the fluidity of correspondences and allowed participants to clearly articulate their responses. To acknowledge the individual voices of my consultants, I have included the German original, alongside an English translation of interview quotations used in the main text.
Both German transcriptions and English translations of interviews, as well as the relevant research ethics documents are included as appendices A-I, pp. Drawing on literature from the German and English-speaking fields, I occasionally include archaic, GDR-idiomatic terminology to account for specific examples. My translation and definition of these terms in the thesis text should allow the reader to follow my points more clearly.
In chapter four, I augment the ethnographic and discursive exploration of my research outcomes by analysing two concrete examples of commercially recorded East German folk and protest songs through a musicological paradigm. Charles Seeger has noted the shortcomings of this conventional, originally prescriptive mode of music writing to serve as a descriptive representation in accounts of human music making. Notwithstanding the reality that notation can never accurately account for the Gestalt of our culturally informed sound perception, I use it merely for illustrative purposes, to support my stylistic analysis.
Additionally, referring to concrete musical transcriptions allows me to show, how a rich sub- text, which was conveyed by GDR folk musicians to their audiences through historical song texts, also manifested in terms of affectively engaging musical elements. During my fieldwork in Germany, one pathway for accessing these musical resources was archival research. Initially, I focus on literature in the domain of German folk music studies dealing with the romantic-nationalistic German folk music concept.
Subsequently, I explore scholarly works on post-war German folk music revival movements and the dynamics of nostalgia, which were conveyed through an Irish-inspired revivalist soundscape in East and West Germany. Afterwards, I examine literature in the field of GDR studies that allows me to expand upon the revival of 19th century German-language protest folk songs in the East German scenario. Following my critique of scholarly theories that lead me to nuance the politically-oppositional capacities of folk songs in the GDR, I identify existing scholarship on semiotics that enables me to show, how these mechanisms play out in specific textual and musical form.
Pre-World War II Romantic-Nationalistic Frameworks Drawing upon literature in the field of German folk music studies allows me to frame the lived musical experience of GDR folk music practitioners as positioned at the historical juncture between a pre-World-War-II ethnic-nationalistic German folk music concept, its problematic entanglement with Nazi-propaganda in the midth century, and post-war folk music revival movements, which unfolded almost simultaneously in West and East Germany. This complex historical and contextual backdrop has to be unravelled in order to comprehend, why German folk songs were revived in a particular textual form and soundscape in the GDR.
Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman has traced the origins of a pre-World War II romantic German folk song concept in reference to the 18 th century writings of German philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder. While this drastic development is clearly located at the root of German folk music revival efforts following the demise of the Nazi Era, Bohlman only marginally portrays musical post-war dynamics.
Therefore, I consult the work of German ethnomusicologist Britta Sweers, who expands upon the ramifications for folk music making in the two post-war German states. Sweers particularly focuses on a post-war escapist identity crisis that was widely experienced among German folk musicians, who were confronted with the widespread marginalisation of performance traditions. These revived German-language songs could be used to metaphorically critique the East German organisational structures Robb ; ; As Robb notes, Steinitz provided song resources, which reflect the rebellious spirit of the Revolution in the numerous independently-ruled petty states existing prior to the foundation of a unified German Empire in Precisely these oppositional songs of the past led GDR folk musicians to exploit a sub-text from which to voice resistance and a longing for freedom that was stimulated by their initial draw to a related Irish song repertoire.
Informant responses indicate that this particular song canon aptly lent itself to accounting for the uncomfortable reality of socialist stagnation that became apparent in the GDR from the late s onwards. Lutz Kirchenwitz , former member of the GDR youth song movement, has written on the various song genres and artist groups that formed in the GDR from the s onwards, ranging from songs of the initially popular Hootenanny Klubs to the state-sponsored Singebewegung and state-critical Liedermacher.
His work uncovers, in differentiated ways, the attributes of a state-supported genre of social music making that informants I interviewed in the field aimed to dissociate themselves from and serves as a point of departure for understanding reasons for this shift. On the contrary, Kirchenwitz clarifies the facets of the Singebewegung that drew many practitioners to its model of music making.
Instead, Robb outlines that GDR artists employed numerous creative strategies to maintain a performative platform, while still communicating subversive messages through the sub-text of their songs. Volkes Lied und Vater Staat thus serves as an important reference point for contextualising the musical encounters of my informants in a broader social, cultural and political sphere. Weltfestspiele in , a musically-underscored propaganda event aimed at implementing utopian ideals of a socialist world view in the minds of the GDR youth, illustrates the ramifications for a shift in the musical experience of East German folk music revivalists, who were gradually confronted with the harsh stagnation of a utopian socialist dream that was propagated on an official level.
Considering these two historical key events is crucial to understand, how subversive regime critique expressed in the songs of GDR folk musicians manifested in textual and musical form and how these features contrasted with the top-down, state-imposed ideological message. A greater focus on musicological both textual and sonic dynamics concerns me in chapter four of my thesis, as previous scholarly inquiry on folk music making in the GDR Kirchenwitz ; Robb ; Leyn appears to have either foregrounded ethnographic and discursive modes of analysis, or merely considered the underlying meanings of song texts.
Discussions of how 19th century folk songs were musically reinterpreted in the GDR revival context inevitably raise questions of artistic legitimacy and authenticity Stokes , pp. This point is key to understanding, how subtle musical references, adjuncts to the subversive song texts, served as sonic short hands for critique in the East German context. Thomas Turino ; has proposed that the theory of Peircean semiotics offers a pathway for making sense of this form of emotionally engaging sound perception and for comprehending, how music is readily politicised, due to its iconic and indexical potential.
The foregoing review has provided an overview on the various scholarly fields, literary sources, and established discourses that my research on folk music revival in the GDR engages and seeks to contribute to. Furthermore, I have indicated, how relevant literature allows me to underscore and nuance outcomes of my ethnographic research that are located at the heart of my narrative.
Undoubtedly, critical examination of existing literature in this field needs to be supplemented by ethnographic and musicological modes of analysis, which leads me to uncover, what exactly constitutes the lived musical experience of folk musicians in the German Democratic Republic, how practitioners conceptualised their performance practice, and how this manifests in concrete textual and musical form.
At first, it is inevitable to historically trace transformations in a pre-World War II romantic-nationalistic German folk music concept, which, in light of its ideological corruption in the Third Reich, led to a novel, textual and sonic reinterpretation of German folk music practice in post-war times. Chapter two sets out to establish this crucial historical backdrop for my thesis. In chapter three, I compare ethnographic responses commenting on the subversive nature of songs in the GDR performance context to established scholarly discourses on the relationship between artists and state institutions.
Wolff, I expressed my interest in the sonic and textual ramifications of his performance practice. His response illustrates the challenges that musicians in both German post-war states faced, when they were confronted with the widespread rejection of German vernacular music, song specifically, due to its misuse by the Nazis during the Third Reich: Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell , p. While Hill and Bithell list multiple revival characteristics, among them the centrality of revival activists, a desire for change and discourses on authenticity, which all apply to the German case in different ways, they emphasize that revivals bring with them transformative capacities, whenever an aspect of the past is de-contextualised from its source domain and becomes re-contextualised in terms of the needs of the present.
This is evident in: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Tradition, Frankfurt am Main: This contextual outline equips me to show, how different facets of nostalgia, whether in their reflexivity of longing, their restorative capacities Boym , or in their substitutive Ersatz function Appadurai , have shaped the transformation of German folk music in West Germany and the GDR. In fact, on a textual level, the topicality of Irish protest songs equally stimulated a renewed interest in German-language song material and it was a growing need to identify, how these songs compared to their Irish counterpart that informed a subsequent revival of a democratic 19th century German folk song heritage once suppressed by the Nazis.
As members of an intellectual and political elite, Arnim and Brentano effectively underscored the concept of the nation with musical features. An excursion into the song repertoire of the Revolution, an important divergence from the grand narrative of music and its liaison with German nationalism, is necessary to evidence, how these protest songs of the past later became relevant in the GDR as sources that facilitated a platform for folk music revivalists to air dissatisfactions with centralised socialist organisational structures.
Illustrating this mechanism requires a more thorough discussion of the thematic issues at stake in revived East German folk songs, an aspect that I will focus on in chapter three. At this point in the present chapter, I turn to outlining the drastic political co-option of German folk music by the Nazi regime, something that is located at the root of post-war folk music revivals in West and East Germany. When European nationalism entered the 20th century, remnants of a democratic revolutionary song repertoire were increasingly supplanted by a political agenda implemented from the top down.
On the level of social music making, The Wandervogel youth music movement, which had existed since , provided a significant context for amateur folk singing in the German language and stood in strong opposition to popular bourgeois and formalised music education Sweers forthcoming, p. The co-option of folk music as part of Nazi propaganda led to an intense, racially-motivated underscoring of Germanic national identity.
A move from folk music as individual expression, portrayed by Herder, to an anti-individualistic, popular appeal Sweers , p. On the other hand, politically- charged marching songs were forbidden. A resulting break in the transmission of folk songs, now intertwined with the tag of Nazi propaganda, alienated much of the traditional material from its original performance context.
For example, West German poet and folk singer Franz Josef Degenhardt tantalizingly summarised the then prevailing fragility of German cultural expression by provocatively asking: A widespread marginalisation of performance traditions stimulated what Sweers , p. For members of the political song movement in the BRD, texts served the novel purpose of underscoring left-wing rejection of the conservative policies pursued by the Konrad Adenauer government. I now proceed to take a closer look at the ways in which Irish music, first sonically, then textually, afforded GDR folk musicians to rediscover a similar political edge to folk song in order to recast their identity as practitioners, who sought to musick 5 independently from the state.
Importantly, the etymology of this genre is also rooted in the impact of the American folk music revival of the s and 60s on artists in the Federal Republic of Germany, and on social music making in the GDR Leyn , p. In , the East Berlin Hootenanny Klub was initiated by Canadian folk singer and banjo player Perry Friedman and provided a platform for spontaneous sessions of leftist protest singing that students and other aspiring folk musicians could engage in Leyn , p.
This strategic move asserted the ideological control of the Socialist Unity Party SED- Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands over artistic expression, by promoting a DDR-konkret repertoire as a canon for its redefined youth song movement, the Singebewegung. Ironically, the state-conform Singebewegung itself provided 6 Lutz Kirchenwitz , pp.
Yet, Kirchenwitz , p. This independent consolidation complicates a universal dismissal of the youth song movement as a mere enactment of top-down, state-conform objectives. Wir wollten unser eigenes Ding machen und die Folkszene bot das. We wanted to do our own thing and the folk music scene facilitated that. Dann haben wir gesagt, dass wir ja dort herkommen und von dort wegwollen. Wolff portrays the dilemma experienced by post-war East German folk music revivalists. On the one hand, their longing for independent artistic expression from state-sponsored song movements and a reinvigorated performative folk music practice was overshadowed by the uncomfortable legacy of the Nazi-tainted, romantic Volkslied repertoire and its mass-appeal.
As Robb , p. Critically, Britta Sweers outlines that, in the context of this identity crisis, Anglo-Irish traditional music genres provided a suitable Ersatz, a sonically-salient replacement for folk- style music and local German folk music traditions that had become widely extinct in the aftermath of the Third Reich: It also provided a musical basis in the face of the extreme marginalization of performance traditions.
For Appadurai, Ersatz nostalgia unfolds as the reclamation of aspects one never thought one had lost. While the reflective nostalgia dwells on an intense feeling of longing and its frictions with belonging, its restorative counterpart seeks to re-establish continuity with a lost past. As East Germany was radically sealed-off from the surrounding non-socialist economic zone, it is plausible that precisely this level of seclusion initially amplified reflective nostalgic longings among GDR folk musicians to explore the dislocated world beyond the Wall.
Music served as an intensely affective medium capable of carrying these sentiments. One could argue that this indicates a historically-rooted Germanic draw to the culture of the European fringe, which resurfaces, in a different nostalgic guise, in the GDR. Soon, different types of bagpipes became part of the local folk music soundscape, a development which later contributed to a renaissance of German medieval music. In my recourse to Ersatz and reflective nostalgia as tools to shape outcomes in my own field research, I have clarified that an Irish-inspired soundscape initially equipped GDR folk musicians with a novel sonic, and performative platform to recast their nostalgic longings for a lost romantic German folk music heritage through an exotic musical Other.
Micromusics of the West Mark Slobin provides a seminal ethnomusicological framework for comprehending the numerous complexities of cross- cultural musical interrelations in the modern, fragmented and de-territorialised world we live in. Slobin analyses music a conduit for synthesizing local with national and intercultural planes of lived musical experience and he recognizes the immediacy of increasing global cultural flow Slobin , p. This pertains specifically to GDR folk musicians, who, albeit under travel restrictions imposed by the East German government, identified channels through which they could access Irish music and satisfy their force fields of musical desire and belonging Slobin , x.
Wolff trace their own intercultural affinity towards the idiom of Irish music to formative encounters with Irish and Scottish artists at the Festival des politischen Liedes, the annual festival of political song held in East Berlin from to Wolff describes, how attending a concert by the Sands Family in was key in altering his musical worldview: As a self-taught folk music practitioner, Wolff states that Irish music, while an inherently complex genre of acoustic music, signalled a lower level of musical prowess that was required to master it Wolff , Interview, Appendix B, p.
Besides highlighting the accessibility of the material in terms of prowess, he appreciates song performances that exhibit a high degree of spontaneity and freedom of expression, elements which he borrowed from his prototypical role models, the Irish ballad band The Dubliners 9. The impact of this performative model becomes clear when he states that he continues to incorporate this feature as part of his ongoing work with fellow artist Dieter Beckert and their satirical duet Duo Sonnenschirm: At that time, the s Irish folk revival brought with it increased performance, recording, and dissemination opportunities for artists like The Dubliners, who could consequently access the international touring circuit and successfully market their music to German audiences.
For further details on the global reception of Irish song performance, see: On the contrary, Robb clarifies that significant commonalities between the two locations unfold in relation to 19th century songs dealing with widely experienced issues of hunger, emigration, and, most notably, rebellion. The latter refers to a thematic overlap between Irish songs voicing protest against the British coloniser and German revolutionary songs that deal with the uprisings against rulers in the multiple principalities in German lands.
Wolff , Interview, Appendix B, pp. Indeed, these songs mirrored then widespread concerns among GDR artists and audiences, resonating with desires to emigrate to the Federal Republic of Germany and the encounters of many with the compulsory military service in a state that outlawed the expression of pacifism Robb , p. Dazu kam noch, dass es ganz gut in dieses anti-imperialistische Weltbild hineinpasste.
In fact, it fitted in with our anti-imperialistic world views. The following chapter sets out to illustrate the ramifications, under which artists in the GDR rediscovered 19th century democratic German language song material. Now, the focus of artists gradually shifted from Anglo-Irish to German-language song material. Wolff aptly summarises the creative spirit among musicians who gathered at the Leipzig folk music workshop, individuals who sought to determine, how German material might compare to its Irish counterpart: We now have to commit ourselves to engaging with German folk songs, be it a short-term or a long-term engagement.
As will become pertinent in a subsequent discussion of the political and subversive potential of song texts situated in historical contexts, mediating material to audience members whose mother tongue was German had lasting implications on the significance of revived German folk songs in the GDR. While the primary aim of this chapter is to draw upon complexities in ethnographic material to identify, how this mechanism unfolded for practitioners, it is also vital to nuance the degree to which folk musicians actually intended to convey a politically-oppositional message through this sub-text.
I show that GDR folk musicians could actively express themselves on both creative and subversive levels, appealing to audiences in a strikingly intellectual fashion. Nevertheless, as part of their lived musical experience, artists still had to manoeuver between intermittent state-critique and conformity, in order to maintain a performative platform and to receive financial support from the authorities. His collected songs not only appealed to East German folk musicians, who aspired to identifying German-language material that resonated with a nostalgic rebellious fascination initially stimulated by an Irish Ersatz.
As Bohlman , p. Steinitz himself expands upon this feature in the preface to his publication, where he emphasises that collective attributes of folk songs emerge out of the shared sentiments of the working people Steinitz , p. According to Hobsbawm, traditions that claim to be old can also become established as invented and artificial continuities with a selective past. As Robb , pp. Songs labelled as DDR-konkret, and thus selectively crediting the positive facets of everyday working life in East Germany Robb , p.
State- critical songs, on the other hand, were prohibited and sometimes even censored. Weltfestspiele in 11, was yet to be fulfilled: Additional facets of the event are outlined by: This allowed them to critique the issue of socialist stagnation that increasingly penetrated the public consciousness in the late s. This strategy allowed performers to elegantly 12 manoeuver around the imperatives of state censorship and surveillance by the Stasi secret police. Wir haben gesagt, es sei alles traditionell und das haben wir dort gefunden.
We just told them, it was traditional material and indicated, where we found it. Wolfgang Leyn provides insights into encounters between East German folk musicians, who rejected an affiliation with the Singebewegung, and agents of the MfS in: For example, he refers to a folk dance song which addressed a local pollution issue, something that otherwise could not be openly critiqued without being subject to censorship: However, the original song is: How exactly was this sub-text received by audience members? Wolfgang Leyn retrospectively describes this unique listening habit as follows: Das ist das, was heute verloren gegangen ist.
According to Wolff, the song texts appealed to a selective, educated audience, primarily consisting of those who attended concerts in student clubs. Judging by fieldwork outcomes presented above, GDR folk music revivalists clearly transformed the German folk song concept from its historically-framed romantic-nationalistic connotations, forging a distinctly democratic, oppositional genre, albeit drawing on the work of intellectuals like Wolfgang Steinitz.
Given the apparent re-interpretation of historically- oppositional song material with the objective of critiquing conditions existing as impositions in the GDR reality, it is tempting to interpret the scene as inherently politically motivated. This would appear as a logical conclusion, particularly since Eyerman and Jamison argue that social movements augment their cultural objectives through political activism: As cultural as well as political actors, social movements reinterpret established and shared frameworks of meaning which make communication and coordinated action possible.
I explore this aspect in the following section. In this respect, they reveal tendencies towards political opposition, alongside statements that merely comment on the political, social, and cultural status quo. Therefore, it is paramount to shed light on the ambiguous relationship between folk musicians and authorities, taking into consideration that the degree of censorship enforced by the state was in fact regulated depending on the case at hand.
Importantly, government agencies also provided the necessary infrastructures to supply artists with performance opportunities. The following fieldwork responses are emblematic of these ramifications: While he admits that the band did play potentially subversive material when performing music on the street, he rejects the claim that they tested the boundaries of uncensored expression.
Instead, Lumich accepted limitations set by the 13 The Hungarian dance house movement, which was initiated at an inaugural meeting in Budapest in Quigley , p. Consequently, initial acoustic folk bands had to increase their instrumentation and adjusted to playing with amplification to cater for large-scale folk dance evenings.
For a thorough examination of the Hungarian dance house movement, consult: Oxford University Press, Furthermore, Gert indicates that he did not regard the performance of 19th century songs of emigration as a form of critique, aimed at the then current travel restrictions in place. To him, those songs provided means of accounting for the current state of affairs, the uncomfortable, yet existing condition that many GDR citizens applied for exit visas: According to their categorisation, performers were eligible to receive a set fee by youth clubs and other venues, regardless of the profit generated by an event organiser through ticket sales Leyn , pp.
Wie weit kann man gehen und wann geht man zu weit? Some people loved provocation and it was like a game. How far can one go and where is the limit? In fact, this discourse proves incompatible with the multiple shades of East German lived musical experience. I agree with Robb, who primarily refers to state-critical Liedermacher in this regard, and I claim that his point can be extended to account for the lived experiences of GDR folk musicians as well.
Wolff aptly summarises this mechanism as follows: Was nicht erlaubt war, war auf jeden Fall verboten. If something was not allowed, it was definitely forbidden. He concludes that characterising critical song texts as sources for fundamental political opposition is inadequate and merely reflects the wishful thinking of many West German scholars.
This organisational structure counteracted arrangements already in place for the promotion of the arts in the GDR and was set up to defend the interests of folk musicians in front of the administration Leyn , p. The government responded that it was impossible to implement such a committee, because a movement from below was unheard of Wolff , Interview, Appendix B, p. As Wolff remarks, it was precisely the five-year period between and that it took to initiate the state-controlled committee during which the GDR folk music scene reached its apex. In the framework of the folk opera, the messengers were figuratively portrayed as members of the administration, employees of the Stasi secret police, bar owners, and educators.
Commonly, those were perceived as individuals that abided by state regulations and contributed to limiting the freedom of artistic expression in the GDR. In this case, however, the sub-text was clearly understood by the authorities and the opera was banned at its dress rehearsal. Auch bei denen wirst du welche dabeigehabt haben, die gesagt haben: Even among them, you could have a few that said: Consequently, artists could operate in a considerable grey area between the liminal spaces of subversion and censorship.
Es konnte mal ganz eng werden und dann war es auch schon wieder vergessen. Sometimes, we could be very restricted, but after that, it was all forgotten. Informed by the desire to voice song messages that were initially communicated in popular Anglo-Irish repertoire through the medium of German-language material, revivalists rediscovered revolutionary songs collected by Wolfgang Steinitz in the 19th century. It was equally significant for folk music revivalists in the GDR, who managed to exploit the ambiguous label of the revolutionary Erbe to employ a rich historical sub-text inherent in oppositional folk songs to address existing issues in the East German present.
This nuancing is necessary, as folk musicians had to mediate a liminal middle ground between submission to organisational structures and critique. Figuratively speaking, while adjusting to the imperatives set by the cultural administration allowed them to attain a professional performance platform from the bottom up, the degree to which censorship of artistic expression was actually enforced by authorities from the top down was largely dependent on context and the personalities involved.
Thus far, my thesis has foregrounded the discursive and ethnographic analysis and now moves to a greater musicological focus. Arguably, 19th century songs dealing with the experience of German mass emigration to America Robb , p. Wolfgang Leyn notes the resonances between Irish songs of emigration, 19 th century German- language songs dealing with the often hazardous sailing to America, and widespread applications for exit visas in the GDR: GDR citizens applied for exit visas laughs.
Instead, it was understood as addressing the widespread longings for increased freedom of travel to the West: Es wusste jeder, dass mit Amerika nicht unbedingt Amerika gemeint war, sondern es kann ja auch die Bundesrepublik gemeint sein. Instead, it could have been the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is crucial, since existing scholarship on East German folk music appears to have been preoccupied with highlighting the linguistic sub-text of folk songs Robb ; ; However, little has been written to date on the ways in which music itself and its sonic impression functioned as a subversive medium for folk music practitioners in the GDR, while also being employed as a tool by the state to spread its ideological message. This is significant, as Peirce diverges from discourses that are readily concerned with equating music and language as modes of communication.
Instead, Peircean semiotics, while nonetheless considering abstract, language- based thought in its taxonomy, uncovers affective responses to music that resist linguistic reasoning. Examining the rich symbolically-linguistic sub-text inherent in the content of 19th century German folk songs leads me to shed light on language-based processes of understanding at work for both practitioners and audiences in the GDR. Here, Peirce offers useful tools to trace, how subversive messages were symbolically constructed by folk revivalists.
Furthermore, I use Peircean semiotics to illustrate the sonic and affective mobilisation of East German folk and protest music from the bottom up, by folk revivalists themselves, and from the top down, by the Communist SED Party. Peirce defines a sign as something that represents something else, an object, to someone. This sign-object relationship creates specific effects, called interpretants, in the perceiver. Peirce further accounts for relationships between signs and the objects they refer to.
In this regard, icons are signs that are tethered to objects through some degree of resemblance. The creative artistic strategy of deliberately juxtaposing musical indices in a given performance context to play off of the original meanings of the signs Turino , p. Rhemes are signs that can possibly depict an object, whereas dicents represent existent, truthful relationships between signs and objects. Arguments, in turn, are sign relationships that are assessed on the basis of linguistic reasoning.
Signs that rely on this level of linguistic abstraction to mediate their relationship to objects are called symbols. However, symbols can also evoke felt indexical relationships, when co- occurring with other symbols in a specific context. Having barely survived, they express their disillusionment and emerging nostalgia when trying to adjust to a new life in America. Processes of semantic snowballing, the acquisition of new indexical connotations, and creative indexing, are at work when this indexical argument is coupled with the performance context of the GDR, where longings for emigration to the West were intensely and emotionally experienced, yet oppressed by the administration.
Wolff and his fellow band members once again resort to this semiotic process in their last four verses. Wolff and Manfred Wagenbredt. Leyn , Interview, Appendix F, p. An American friend told him: We also interpreted the German folk song repertoire through an Irish lens. To him, this is clearly distinguished from polyphonic vocal textures, a prominent stylistic feature of German art music: Instead, they all referred to the principal melody line. Yet, the rhythm is identically replicated by both singers.
The two voices dynamically and forcefully resound through their harmonic synergies, a feature that musically underscores the profound longing for emigration and the dissatisfaction with rulers and their exploitation expressed in the previously analysed symbolic sub-text of this verse. Locating sonic authenticity in the affective responses that music generates for the perceiver is a key argument in the subsequent part of this chapter in my thesis. Outlining the reversal, Turino , p. What does this twofold argument tell us about the Irish sonic element performed by GDR folk bands and how it is perceived, categorised, and affectively experienced by their audience?
Wir haben ganz wild gemixt. Da kam eine Mandoline, eine Drehleier und noch eine Tin Whistle hinzu. We simply combined mandolins with hurdy-gurdy and tin whistle. Which regional traditions could we have possibly immersed ourselves in? This move from discursive to experiential authenticity allows me to locate another, musically- salient level of the sub-text communicated by East German folk music revivalists. From a musical standpoint, the interlude mirrors characteristics discussed earlier in relation to the accompaniment texture chosen by the band, but distinctly stands out through the use of instrumentation, metre, and tonality.
The contrapuntal interplay between Waldzither and mandolin is augmented by the addition of violin, playing the primary theme, and a hammered dulcimer. Involving another layer of semantic snowballing, the interlude also co-occurs with the song text that symbolically addresses an identification with the city of San Francisco. As described earlier, on a symbolic level of abstraction, this song tells the story of German emigration to America and becomes a rhematic index that could be interpreted to critique the travel restrictions in place in the GDR. When these two semiotic streams correlate, the listener is confronted with a raft of conflicting emotions.
While intensely experiencing the indexed belonging to San Francisco when listening to the interlude, the perceiver also realises that such a sense of belonging cannot be fulfilled in the sealed-off GDR. Equally, the interlude is affectively perceived as indexing countercultural movement, but in a GDR context, the expression of countercultural ideals was problematic.
According to Robb , p. Throughout the three verses, the listener is directly addressed by a collective, which strives for social progress and repeatedly demands the individual to step forward and unveil, whether it identifies with the ideals of the collective or chooses to stay behind. When the listener is frequently asked: Moreover, the melody line of the chorus Fig.
This infusion of novel identity layers in a suitable performance context allows us to understand, how a popular protest song can, under specific circumstances, attain iconicity for the GDR state, its Singebewegung, and its desired, synchronised identity, which becomes unified through a shared ideological persuasion. In conclusion, this chapter set out with the objective of a more musically-underpinned, in contrast to the previously dominating discursive and ethnographic modes of analysis, in order to augment our understanding of the lived experience of GDR folk musicians.
On the one hand, East German folk musicians expected their audiences to display a shared level of competence in terms of cognitively evaluating the symbolic sub-text of historical folk songs and their relevance in the GDR. This textual level of understanding was augmented through subtle musical references, which generated felt responses in the listener and amplified the subversive effect. The concept of creative indexing, as outlined by Turino, also reveals, why a combination of stylistic mosaic stones characterises the soundscape of GDR folk bands.
On the contrary, the GDR state equally realised the iconic and indexical potential of music for supporting its own ideological aims from the top down.
Gästebuch, guestbook, livre d'or, album de visitantes
This affective and musically generated degree of synchronisation with the state, in contrast to a strive for individuality, reveals, why folk musicians in the GDR avidly set out to define an independent artistic identity. As shown in the course of this chapter, ethnographic and discursive analysis needs to be augmented through musicological examination and the consideration of the affective potential of music in order to access this particular plane of lived musical experience.
While primarily nuancing existing portrayals of the relationship between practitioners and the East German state, I have explored the various pathways through which individual folk music revivalists have conceptualised their practice on concrete sonic and textual levels. Initially, I have drawn out the historical backdrop of a romantic-nationalistic German folk song concept, which surfaced in the 18th and 19th centuries and became misused for propaganda purposes by the Nazi regime in the midth century.
This has equipped me to show, how post-war revivalists in East Germany, following their nostalgic draw to Irish music as a sonic replacement for their own marginalised vernacular music, reconnected with a democratic 19 th century German-language folk song heritage that proved strikingly topical in terms of its applicability in the GDR.
Providing insights into the subversive potential of these songs in critiquing social, cultural, and political circumstances in East Germany, I have equally differentiated, how artists managed to maintain a performative platform while, at the same time, voicing regime critique. To clarify meaning of revived German folk songs for GDR artists, audiences and centralised authorities, I have finally moved to a musicological and semiotic mode of analysis of two concrete folk and protest song case studies, which has allowed me to identify notions of sonic authenticity tethered to the GDR revival context and has led me to uncover, how the lived experience of my informants is expressed in affectively engaging sonic and textual form.
While I draw specifically on the importance of remembering lived musical experience in this context, the scope of my conclusion does not allow me to elaborate, for instance, on the significance of the Rudolstadt Folkfest in reunified Germany, which was instrumental in bringing revivalists from both German post-war states together. The traumatic impact of mass mobilisation and the role of German folk music in supporting the Nazi regime led to widespread marginalisation of German folk music after the demise of the Nazi Era.
Initial intercultural affinities Slobin between East German folk musicians and the idiom of Irish music were shaped by formative encounters with Irish artists at the annual Festival des politischen Liedes in East Berlin. In this context, considering the multiplicity of nostalgia, as outlined by Boym , proved fruitful in making sense of the part that Irish music played in reconfiguring East German post-war identity.
Clearly, a widely-shared Irish- inspired soundscape among folk musicians in the GDR first revealed their reflective nostalgia for a romantic and exotic otherness rooted in the music of the Celtic European fringe Reiss The Democratic German Folk Song Erbe and Oppositional Nuances The need to communicate the messages of Irish protest songs and their topicality in the East German present through the medium of German-language song, a common denominator of cultural identity formation, led to the consolidation of an independent GDR folk music scene in This nuancing of paradoxes in lived musical experience is necessary, as GDR folk musicians had to mediate between submission to organisational structures and intermittent critique, to avail of financial support from the state.
- German to English translator specialising in the humanities and social sciences.
- Dictionary Navigation.
- Testimone il Ticino (Italian Edition).
As a sonic icon for identification with an American metropolis and its countercultural movements, the interlude creatively indexes a longing for travel and the expression of countercultural protest when performed in an East German context. It is the rhematic possibility of establishing these subversive indexical links that provided GDR folk musicians with substantial creative agency from the bottom up, to avoid censorship exerted by the authorities from the top down.
The end of the GDR and its administrative apparatus also meant that the vivid sub-text of folk songs, the interpretation of which relied on the often ambiguous relationship between folk musicians and the state, was ultimately erased. Comparing the demise of the GDR to an irreversible system failure, Wolfgang Leyn outlines the implications of this drastic political and social change for the longevity of the GDR folk music scene: Die Lieder verloren den doppelten Boden, die Szene verlor die Auftrittsorte, weil die Jugendklubs reihenweise geschlossen wurden und die Finanzierung unklar war.
The song texts lost their ambiguous meaning and the scene lost its performance spaces, because youth clubs had to be shut down. The financial support was precarious. Wolff emphasizes that the listening habits of audience members changed profoundly: Die Leute haben ganz andere Interessen. People have different interests. As Wolff puts it, the underlying significance of the post-war revival movement in the GDR can only be fully grasped by making sense of joyous musical moments of revelation, precisely the potentially subversive, sonically and textually mediated being-in-the-world of socialism that artists communicated to their audiences: Aber eigentlich braucht jeder dieses Erweckungserlebnis, dass er selbst dorthin kommt.
Das ist das, was auch die meiste Laune macht. However, you really need the revelation of discovering all that yourself. GDR folk musicians succeeded in mobilising an until then unprecedented, democratic German folk song concept, which formed a distinct expressive medium and was intellectually valuable in the context of socialism.
Not least, the avid reception of an Irish- inspired performance style by East German artists forms a significant reference point for historically tracing the ongoing popularity of Irish Traditional Music in Germany, a terrain, which requires further research. On a broader scale, the subversive and affectively engaging capacity of both texts and stylistic features in the GDR reminds us, as ethnomusicologists, that music can serve as a vital conduit to open performative channels for individual practitioners, who set out to voice protest, even if the overt expression of same is suppressed by political leaders.
Verlag Neue Musik Berlin. University of Minnesota Press.